Disaster Agency Focus: Plan For Surviving Nuclear War

February 24, 1993|By Cox News Service.

WASHINGTON — The federal agency charged with responding to natural disasters has spent most of its time and money over the past decade on a top-secret multibillion-dollar program to help the government survive a nuclear war.

Only 20 members of Congress-those with adequate security clearance-know that rather than concentrating on natural disasters such as last year's Hurricane Andrew, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has been assigned to gear up for doomsday.

Even FEMA's natural disaster specialists have been largely unaware of the war-survival program, which was set up in 1982 with the help of former White House national security aide Oliver North.

From 1982 to 1991, FEMA spent more than $1.3 billion on equipment, support facilities and personnel to provide communications for government leaders in a nuclear war. In addition, the agency spent nearly $1.6 billion on related national security programs, for a total of $2.9 billion.

The money appears annually in the federal budget as a single line-"submitted under a separate package."

Together, national security programs accounted for 78 percent of FEMA's budget for the period. Disaster response accounted for 6.6 percent of the budget.

FEMA was widely criticized for its inadequate response to Hurricane Andrew in Florida last August, and the head of its disaster office has called for more employees. Members of Congress and others have said disaster response should be restructured. It is debatable whether the national security effort took away resources from disaster relief.

The security program came to light in a Cox Newspapers investigation after Andrew. It includes a fleet of 300 vehicles in five mobile units scattered from Washington state to Massachusetts, from Colorado to Texas to Georgia.

The mobile units can operate for a month without support. They include generators capable of powering a three-story airport terminal and a fuel tanker that can suck up diesel fuel from whatever service stations survive a nuclear blast.

The units are called Mobile Emergency Response Support units, or MERS. No complete unit has ever been deployed, though parts of units were sent to Florida after Hurricane Andrew.

MERS began in 1982 when President Ronald Reagan's National Security Council decided that, given the improvements in nuclear missiles, bomb shelters built for government leaders in the 1950s were no longer adequate.

So the NSC devised a plan to make the government mobile during a nuclear attack by placing officials in less elaborate fallout shelters and moving them frequently.

The theory was that a president zigzagging across the country needs to talk to generals around the world and whatever is left of his government. MERS was the answer.

"People still believed nuclear war was likely," said a former Defense Department official with close ties to FEMA. "People were not really thinking about hurricanes and earthquakes, they were thinking about war with the Soviet Union."

Oliver North, who was deputy to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, "would deal with the contractors" developing MERS, according for a former FEMA official. "He was always on the exercises. He had a big, big hand in it for a long, long time."

Neither North nor McFarlane, principles in the Iran-contra arms-for-hostages swap, could be reached for comment.